"The Invitation perfectly captures something essential about life in Los Angeles," said Shapiro. "Los Angeles is a city of incredible natural beauty and utopian visions, but also a city in which dread, grief, and the curdling of those visions can often lie just underneath the surface. The score mostly functions in the film as the voice of dread, haunted memories, and grief that sits underneath the surface of a dinner party in the hills of LA. The music follows the film in its descent from uneasiness towards true terror."

"Most of the score is performed by one solo violin, overdubbing layer upon layer. The bareness of the solo string for me suggests the desert terrain of LA and the emotional barrenness of the main character Will," said Shapiro. In addition to a violin, he used a boutique instrument called the Swarmatron, which produces eight tones tuned slightly different in pitch to create a natural choral effect. "Craig Wedren's ghostly vocals create a sense of haunting, and the Swarmatron is like a synthetic facsimile of a voice."